Pictured: Collective Narratives features the work of Cassia Kite, Marina Shaltout, Christina Antoniou and more.

Two new art exhibitions open in Burns Court this Saturday, just in time for the Pineapple Slice Art Walk.

At 502 Gallery, Color + Clay highlights the work of Ringling College alumnus Omar Chacon, known for his intricate and many-colored mosaics, alongside the largely monochromatic ceramic art of the late Polly Johnson, a Ringling College instructor whose sculptures in porcelain and stone, each covered in esoteric patterns and lines, lay on display like artifacts from a forgotten people.

Meanwhile, just a few doors down at 512 Pineapple, a special pop-up exhibition unites the work of six local artists, not just in a group show, but as a collaboratively curated experience designed to actively bring their disparate works into direct conversation. Dubbed Collective Narratives, the project features the work of Christina Antoniou, Cassia Kite, Noelle McCleaf, Taylor Robenalt, Selina Roman, and Marina Shaltout, which ranges from painting and sculpture to photography, original music, and even video.

“Everyone has a unique narrative to their work,” says Kite. “We wanted to create an exhibition that fosters a dynamic dialogue between the artists and their works, as well as between the individual pieces themselves.” To that end, no single artist held curatorial control over the show. Instead, they all cooperated and each contributed. “That was essential to creating a shared vision,” Kite says.

The end result is a new kind of group show experience.

Rather than each artist having their own space in the gallery, with visitors shuffling from one to the next as though each were a miniature exhibition all its own, works are grouped according to narrative throughlines or visual commonalities, creating little vignettes only possible through collaboration. In this way, McCleaf’s anthropological photographs of South Florida enter into conversation with the rustic Nebraskan iconography of Kite’s large-scale paintings; Roman’s delicate watercolors can share a chat with Shaltout’s surreal tableaux. And Antoniou’s many “mini-paintings”—oils on woodpanel documenting the artist’s travels and some as small as 1”x1”—can be found making conversation with just about everyone, including a sculpture from Robenalt so iconographically loaded it would make a semiotician blush.

Kite hopes gallerygoers leave the show with a new appreciation for local artists, and maybe something to ponder on the way home.

“They might see something of themselves in the work,” Kite says, “and think about their own narrative.”

Collective Narratives opens this Saturday at 512 Pineapple St., with a reception running 5-8pm.

Pictured: Collective Narratives features the work of Cassia Kite, Marina Shaltout, Christina Antoniou and more.